* What does poetry mean to you?
Part of the difficulty of talking about poetry is that the word Poet (with a capital P) conjures up all kinds of stereotypes, which for many people only serves to remove poetry from their lives rather than remind them how it used to be such a natural ingredient. 

For me, the important thing about being a poet is that it is an active rather than a passive pursuit. It’s not enough to sit around waiting for "inspiration." Poetry tends to come to people who are actively using and exploring language. In the same way that footballers are people who play football, or musicians are people who play music (and hopefully listen to others, challenge themselves and try to improve), it’s necessary for a poet to practice and train, to borrow and imitate, and, now and again, to take a big risk and just let go. Then, if you’re lucky, the occasional poem, like the occasional solo (or solo run) might just find its mark.
 

* Why did you become a poet?
I don’t think anyone becomes a poet, in the sense that poetry is hardly a career choice. Instead poetry is something that many, if not most, people produce at some stage in their lives (usually in their childhoods when language seems new and exciting), and the people we call poets tend to be those who continue with that play or experimentation or exploration into their adult lives. 

Of course, many of these same people also do other things or have other paths and professions, whether they be writing-related (teachers, English professors, writers in various genres, etc) or not. For myself, most of the work I do in the world (and which keeps me alive) is connected in some way with poetry: that’s simply because, even when I’m not writing poems myself, I like to have other people’s poems near.
 

* What does a poet psychologically need to survive?
Poets need to be largely self-sufficient, used to failure.
 

* Did you have a hard time breaking into the poetry world?
Established poets, in my experience, tend to be very welcoming of new poets, just as most established or mid-career musicians tend to be happy to see new musicians come on the scene. Publication is an entirely different thing and can be impossibly labyrinthine or deceptively simple, depending on luck, talent, the direction of the prevailing wind and any number of other factors. 

For my own part, I had spent a few years writing and collecting lyrics (originally with an eye to possibly recording songs) and then I entered a collection in a competition for unpublished books in Ireland. Winning that competition also brought me an offer to publish from a well-known poetry press, so it was a relatively fast and painless experience. The book was called The Unwound Clock (after the idea that a stopped clock will still tell the time correctly twice a day – and explored issues to do with my home place, with memory, with family, with love, etc, all the usual ingredients of the contemporary poem, and every poem ever written as far as I can see.
 

* Any one else in your family a poet? writer? artists? names?
My younger brother Michael is a photographer, and exhibits regularly.
 

* Were your parents supportive?
My father was variously a travel agent (in a town famous for its maximum security political prison – the subject of a prose book I’m working on at present) and also an agent for a company which sold prefabricated wooden doors and windows. 

My mother had been a secretary before getting married but was kept sufficiently busy with myself and my four siblings as what is euphemistically called a housewife – as if she had only been responsible for a building and not the enormously complex and demanding business of feeding, tracking, inspiring, challenging, washing, teaching, nurturing and loving the five helpless individuals the gods had given her to raise to adulthood.

Especially early on, both of my parents worried about my apparent choice to write, as I might have done myself were it not for the fact that in the early 1980s even many of my friends who expressly wantedto work couldn’t find jobs. At least, I suppose, I appeared to be happy doing whatever it was I did all day, and half of the night. In retrospect, it was a hard time for them, as it is for any parent or an artist, musician or poet: hoping their offspring might continue to play with and be open to creative energy, and at the same time able to (like the three little pigs in the story) put and maintain a roof over their own heads.
 

* Is it a fight to keep getting published? 
I’ve published books of poetry, of fiction and of non-fiction. For the non-fiction books I did have an agent, and that was certainly helpful, as I didn’t at that point know much about how the publishing business works. Few poets have or need agents, and few agents are interested in poets. 

An agent earns his/her money from a percentage of the author’s income. The income of most poets (from their publications at least) just about covers the cost of pencils.

Far from being a bad thing, this may well be the best thing about the poetry business: people who are just interested in money quickly lose interest and move on elsewhere. It does mean, though, that poets have to do all sorts of other things to sustain and maintain themselves: this variety of secondary occupations in which poets are engaged may well be another good thing, bringing, as it does, all sorts of new ideas and subject matter into poetry, constantly refreshing the art form with the news and challenges of the world in which poets, and other citizens, live.
 

* What is your writing process? 

I keep a variety of notebooks, copybooks and journals, which I’m constantly adding to and copying back and forth among: and in recent years, because it’s often the sound of something that gets me started, I often also get down a first draft of a poem into a dictaphone. 

Usually the written material is handwritten (not least because I often write it away from my desk) and later, if I like the shape or sound of it, I type it up, print it, revise it, rewrite it, etc etc, until it’s either done or abandoned or so hopelessly far from the initial impulse that I go back to the beginning and start over (trying to keep what was fresh in the first instance). 

This is hardly the least labour-intensive way of working, but the effort of rewriting and retyping is actually a very useful way to test an idea or a line: if something is really not doing its job, tired typing fingers, or a tired brain, will often perform the necessary edit or point out where it should have come.
 

* Is it hard finding themes? What's your rewriting process?
For the most part, I try not to think about themes (or sometimes even subject matter) until at least a first draft of a poem is done. I think I write to discover not to relate. I write not necessarily knowing where I’m going and then, if and when I stumble upon something, I try to zoom in, to chop away, to focus. Of course, concerns and interests will occur and recur, but I try to approach the first draft without too much expectation.
 

* Are you primarily a storyteller? Should poems have a "message" or can they be just a fun read.
Many poems contain stories, or parts of stories. (Think of the huge complex stories of the Odyssey, the Iliad, in Ireland the Táin and other works).But there are many great storytellers who I wouldn’t think of as poets. 

The two are not mutually exclusive, but neither are they mutually dependant. Narrative lends drama, tension, forward drive, etc to language, but the lyric poem often has little of any of these qualities. Instead it derives much of its power and energy from suggestion, repetition, from the gaps in what might be thought of as narrative and into which the reader (or listener) is required to contribute. 

The lyric poem will often put two or more images close to each other, and the reader/listener is given a sense of how they are connected, but there is seldom only a single reading possible – as there must be, for instance, in a narrative in which Action B follows Action A and precedes Action C. The lyric, for various reasons, tends to dominate contemporary English language poetry (perhaps novels and movies have taken over from narrative poetry of earlier periods).
 

* What's the state of the Irish poetry world?
For six years, I programed the Dublin Writers Festival (40 writers/poets over four days in June in the middle of Dublin). For two years, I presented the Poetry Programme on RTE Radio, interviewing poets, taking about poetry books, etc. 

Now I also run a small publishing house producing about 10-12 poetry titles a year, and working with poets and translators on these. And then there’s my own reading, my own favourite poets, the podcasts and websites I subscribe to, the magazines and journals I read, re-read, etc. In some ways I’m surrounded by poetry. Having two small kids, I have a fairly restricted social life these days, and when I’m out of the house/home situation it’s often to present poetry readings, or book lauches of something of that kind. 

So there are plenty – if not too many – opportunities to share thoughts on poetry, even occasionally over a post-reading pint. I don’t think this is all that different in Ireland than in New York, or San Francisco or St Paul – except perhaps that per capita there are a lot of people writing in Dublin (and people coming to Dublin to write) and therefore there are even more challenges for someone like myself to even try to keep up with it all.
 

* What about your family? 
Married (Sept 12, 2001) to a Sicilain wife, Raffaela, from and in Syracusa, and have two children, Lee (5) and Luca (3), whose bilingualism is a great delight and encouragement to me.
 

* What does a poet do to relax?
Can’t talk for other poets, but apart from reading and talking endlessly about poetry to anyone who will listen, I play guitar and like to jam with friends from time to time or experiment with multi-track spoken word and musical soundscapes. 

I live right beside the sea and like to get out and walk the beach whenever I can or take the kids out to explore the wilder end of the local parks. The writing (and publishing) life can be fairly physically inactive – the whole world now stuck in front of screens all day – so when I can I like to be up and about and moving. When we’re in Sicily I want to be in the sea all day, though I seldom have the courage for it in Ireland!
 

* What was your reaction when hearing of your O'Shaugnessy award?
I was delighted when I learned about the O’Shaughnessy award, knowing something about it from some of the previous recipients. The business of making poems is a relatively solitary one and there’s always the sense that, even with a successful poem, it might not end up being seen by very many people. 

An award like the O’Shaughnessy more or less guarantees that at least some of the poems will escape my own reach and find their way to a readership elsewhere. In this respect, I’m inclined to see the award as being for the poems, not for the poet. There’s also, though, the sense that the award is an injunction to go and make more poems and not to get too caught up in or distracted by other things. 

Poems are slow fuses and, even when they’re good, they often take their time finding their way in the world. At times in one’s writing life, this can feel a bit frustrating: an award like the O’Shaughnessy is, in this sense, both and endorsement and an encouragement.

The fact that the award also necessitates a trip to St Paul, and visits to the campus of the University of St Thomas, also allows one, or forces one, to look at the poems again in a new light, from a new perspective. Again this is a great help towards a letting go of the poems, but also towards a renewed understanding of both their successes and their failures.
 

* Would you suggest that poetry be a career choice for a young person?

As I said at the outset, I don’t think poetry is a career. It might be a hobby, or a vocation, a talent or a skill. For most people it’s not necessary to do it to the exclusion of everything else; but it is important to do it as if one’s life depended on it. 

Would I love to see my kids write poems? Of course I would. Will I also teach them how to change a lightbulb, wire a plug, type a letter, fix a puncture, cook a stew or iron a shirt? You bet. 

Anyone with even a passing interest in poem-making better be well able to fend for themselves in the world.